12 East of Laughter, Kenosis, Laughter, and Christ's Human Nature

Advanced Lafferty. I hope this doesn’t come across as needlessly hard in the paint.

Over the last few months, I have thought about Gregorio Montejo’s Balthasarian-inflected reading of Lafferty and where I argue with it. To show my cards, my thinking belongs to a different Catholic tradition, one informed by contemporary Thomism and my favorite contemporary theologian, Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Without White’s work, I could not have written this post. At the same time, Balthasar and Von Speyr have long fascinated me. Balthasar has long been part of my devotional reading, not least because I believe that beauty is one of the transcendentals, and Balthasar is a genius on this topic.

One of the wonderful aspects of Catholic theology is that there are different schools. But I don't subscribe to Holy Saturday theology, and because East of Laughter is a book with a Christological focus, one must think through its theological ideas to arrive at its center: a laughing God conveyed through an aesthetic object, a wild book written by an eccentric Okie. Today, I want to sketch some theological stakes and look at two schools, with a focus on the Thomistic case. Those who are not interested in the details of Christology will find little here to pique their interest. There is no way to write this post without theological jargon that could be alienating. Yet the language is worth knowing. As P. F. Strawson once said, "There is no such thing as elementary philosophy." Sometimes jargon just is unavoidable terminology. Beyond the inherited language, by the end, I want to make a strong argument for what means to hear the shockwave of Christ’s laugh. That is what interests me because it intrigued Lafferty. Keep an eye on this: a laughing Christ.

A while back, Montejo wrote an essay that endorses ("deep continuity") Sergei Bulgakov's elevation of kenotic self-emptying to "the basic, unifying idea for theology," with kenosis reaching "from creation to eschatology" so that "the Son's kenosis permeates the entire economy of creation and salvation." Bulgakov (1871–1944) was a Russian Orthodox priest, philosopher, theologian, and former economist. His chief idea was sophiology: the claim that Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, helps explain how God can be wholly beyond the world and yet present within creation. Bulgakov’s biography is fascinating. He put aside his early interest in Marxism because he believed that social change without spiritual transformation could not meet humanity’s needs. His mature theology emphasized the goodness and transfiguration of creation, but it was controversial in Orthodox circles because critics thought it blurred the line between God and the world. That is part of what this post is about. I think those early Orthodox critics were right. Moreover, Bulgakov was a critic of Roman Catholic dogma, and it is on dogmatic grounds that he will jar against Laffery.

Montejo’s argument runs something like this. Descent-ascent is a metaphysical grammar across myth, philosophy, and Christian theology. Christianity has this grammar but radically personalizes and historicizes it in Christ where divine descent is no longer cosmic procession or heroic katabasis. It is God’s free self-emptying into flesh, death, and abandonment; human ascent is no longer just a return to original but deifying participation in divine life. This kind of argument will be familiar from C. S. Lewis’s “Myth Became Fact”/True Myth idea. Long before that it was Eusebius and praeparatio evangelica. It gets a lot right.

On a reading governed by the divine missions (the economics of salvation), I grant much of what Montejo’s essay says. The souls be measured carefully. Bulgakov’s doctrine of kenosis complicates the entire question. To be clear, by kenosis I will mean only Christ’s self-emptying humility: the eternal Son’s free descent into human body and soul, obedience, suffering, and death, without ceasing to be divine. Bulgakov makes kenosis a feature of the immanent Trinity, an eternal sacrifice constitutive of the divine life, so that for him Christ's kenosis reveals what God eternally is. This view is far more comprehensive than saying kenosis is something the Son does in the assumed humanity. My view is that Bulgakov does much more than make kenosis pervasive in the economy of salvation. He writes kenosis unacceptably into the inner life of the Trinity. I do not believe any form of kenosis as usually understood can belong to the immanent Trinity (the subsistent relations by which the divine persons are distinguished based on relations of origin only, to put it in Thomistic language) without making self-emptying constitutive of God’s being. That, in turn, runs counter to classical Christology.

A simple formula may clarify the point: Christ’s human nature does not belong to the immanent Trinity; kenosis per se is intelligible only through the Son’s assumption of humanity, which is what Paul means when he writes about it in Philippians 2: 6-8. No surprise, then, that I would see a real departure from classical Christian theism, this whole placing of even an “analogical” kenosis within the relations of the divine persons. My claim will be old-fashioned. I read Lafferty through a Chalcedonian and dyothelite Christology, as does Montejo. By Chalcedonian, I mean that Christ is one divine person in two natures, divine and human, without confusion, change, division, or separation; by dyothelite, I mean that this one person with two natures possesses both a divine will and an assumed human will.

To cash this out, I read Freddy Foley’s symbolic descent and ascent in Fourth Mansions as a gratuitous participation in grace, not analogous to the Father's eternal relation to the Son, not an analogy for the filiative process within the Godhead, not as True Myth relative to the relations of the Trinity. Lafferty once said that myth is a way to get at the truth. He did not think of divine revelation itself as being myth but as divine truth, which Montejo, I believe, would acknowledge. Myth gets at truth but revelation just is truth. Lafferty’s Christology seems to present this view. Christ, he said, is the Lord of the Archetypes. Lafferty did not say that Christ is an archetype for the obvious reason he thought Christ was a real person, one with two natures and two wills, no myth about it. His view on this is clearest in From the Thunder Colt’s Mouth where the incarnation is a stubborn fact the Splendid People can’t manipulate.

Christ’s laughter in East of Laughter belongs to the same old-fashioned Christology. Like Christ’s human kenosis, the dynamic belongs to the Son’s assumed human nature rather than to the divine nature. This is related to, but distinct from, my antecedent objection, namely that I think one should be reluctant to install any form of analogical sacrifice (even one of non-loss) inside the immanent Trinity.

This may seem like splitting hairs, yet it bears on Freddy’s participation in the mission of the Son, on the character of Lafferty’s Catholic art, and on Freddy's own theosis. After all, a theologically literate reader will want to ask some hard questions. What is Freddy’s kenosis in the Bug, that is, what does his literary symbolic emtombment and ascension amount to? In what sense is Freddy’s abasement analogous to the historical/temporal kenosis of Christ? Does kenosis reach into the immanent Trinity through an analogy of the Father’s relation to the Son? How does human laughter relate to the laughter of the Laughing Christ and the two natures and the two wills of Christ? Answering these questions will be conditioned by how one conceptualizes the whole problematic of descent and ascent within the Christian world picture. We want to keep the idea of descent-ascent front and center, which is the topic of Montejo’s essay.

Let’s start conservatively. Kenosis pervades the economy of creation and salvation, predicated of the Son in his divinity (all things created through the Word) and his assumed humanity (his death on the Cross). That is not heterodox. What I would not want to grant is kenosis as the basic, unifying idea of theologia as such if by theologia we mean the internal relations of the divine persons. Following Aquinas, the subject, unifying principle, and formal object of theologia are God as the Holy Trinity, not a single dynamic motif. To crown kenosis as that principle, I think, conflates the subsistent relations of the eternal Trinity with the economy in the temporal order of created nature and salvation history.

This can be simply stated. The sacred economy is not a region inside the Godhead; rather, it is the unfolding in time of what God eternally and immutably is. By contrast, the economy is the temporally revelatory “presentation” of the eternal, not something the eternal and impassible Trinity undergoes. What enters time is the effect that humans experience within time: created term joined to an eternal procession. As St. Thomas argued a divine mission is an eternal procession with a created temporal effect added, so that the Son and the Spirit are sent without anything new accruing to the eternal persons. The missions, therefore, presuppose and reveal the processions of the inner life of the Trinity. Kenosis cannot in any way constitute the Trinity. The eternal processions ground the temporal missions, not the other way around. The relation of the Son in the immanent Trinity is the communication of the one undivided essence, entire and with nothing withheld, admitting neither before-and-after nor remainder nor passibility. To call that "emptying" or "sacrifice" is to add to the notional act of filiation. In short, it recasts a relation of origin as an eternal kenosis.

As theology, the Bulgakov lineage of thought thus looks to me Hegelian and developmental, a bit like Bauer's “Third Testament,” which ranks Father, Son, and Spirit as stages, though proponents will deny this vigorously. It temporalizes the eternal relations of the immanent Trinity and calls it analogy and sacrifice without loss. Yet it introjects the “economic Trinity” into the “inner life,” because it adores suffering, then it makes kenosis a single dynamic enthroned as the engine of everything. We might recall the “false and premature mutation” that fails because the Harvesters “hadn't the holy simplicity for it.” The other simplicity I have in mind is the immanent Trinity as God. Many Thomists would reject the entire notion of an economic Trinity as more confused than explanatory but keep the idea of economy as being useful analytic language. I have zero qualms about that.

Again, theologically, the problem is that a certain view of kenosis predicates self-emptying of the divine nature itself. The Bulgakovian model of kenosis describes God's own life rather than the assumed humanity (“divine self-limitation . . . ontologically united"). It amounts to what White has called "inverted monophysitism," because a God who is one in being and will has zero eternal surrender or self-emptying in the divine nature. It hypostatizes human attributes by univocity. Montejo's essay has a footnote that explains kenosis (the Son "took on what he did not have," with no loss of divinity), and that footnote settles the Christological case in the orthodox direction: the kenosis is predicated of the assumed humanity, not of the divine nature. Fair enough. The question is whether the essay's broader metaphysical view of kenosis and ambition stays consistent with its own footnote. This is all that slippery language about grammar and latency.

The theological problem arises when metaphysical kenosis goes a step further and imports self-emptying into the subsistent relations of the Trinity. Inverted monophysitism is the Christological problem: it characterizes the divine nature by reference to human attributes; the eternal self-emptying of the Trinity is where it terminates. In Fourth Mansions, the Harvesters try to seize godhood by their own weird spiritual techniques through the self-mutation ritual, the wounds and injected serums. Then they reap monsters, a murdered member, and a demon they are playing with. Freddy's elevation at the end (“gifts, powers, lives, worlds”) is gratuitous, a grace the Patricks don’t receive, though they keep waiting to be called.

To sharpen this up a little, consider how kenosis talk can too easily arrive at an economy-constitutes-God reading, though Montejo doesn't say this, and I wouldn't want to imply that he does. I do think, however, that the tradition Montejo uses to read Lafferty leans this way. That is just one man's view because one could extrapolate something like the following: "Paradigms of one another," kenosis and theosis as "a single reciprocal movement," and God "humanized for man . . . to that same extent" that man is divinized all get read constitutively, and then this drifts toward von Balthasar's Trinitarian enrichment. Against this is the view that the divine missions of the Trinity reveal the eternal God without constituting him. To his credit, Montejo himself grounds the reciprocity language in Maximus's love and says that deification "perfects rather than dissolves difference" and is "participation . . . in the inner life of the divine Godhead." Maximus is an edifying and brilliant Saint.

I would object to calling descent-ascent the grammar of God, if "grammar" is taken comprehensively of the Trinity. Taken descriptively, the term is harmless. Taken constitutively, it subordinates the intratrinitarian mystery to a structure held latent in the natural and mythic order, when in truth their resemblance to descent-and-ascent is post factum and supernatural, known only in the light of revelation and derivable from no pattern, reason, or myth already possessed. This is the monomyth's mistake, and the Neoplatonist's before it: to make proodos and epistrophe the form the mysteries fill out. Montejo knows this. He calls the pattern "decisively reconfigured and fulfilled," not merely instanced, yet he locates a promise "latent in all earlier cycles." The pressure is on words such as latent and fulfilled. Reconfigured how? If latent is read back from the mysteries, supernatural and after the fact, and we are talking about cultural poetics that may be prepatory for the gospel, nothing is lost. If it names a promise already inscribed in the natural and mythic/poetic order, awaiting actualization, the mysteries are once more subordinated. Latent means hidden. The Holy Spirit, for instance, is latent or hidden in the I AM THAT I AM that Moses heard. Is Christ hidden in Orpheus or Dionysius in the same way? The word "grammar" might invite an inscribed reading, but a commitment to a strictly economic kenosis should rule it out: the Son takes on what he did not have, without change to the divine nature. Myth may prepare for the gospel, but how can it be a grammar the immanent mystery instances? This is why "reconfigure" is so ambiguous and needs to be spelled out. Does reconfigure mean reshaping a real pattern already latent in the natural and mythic order, or only reshaping how we read the old myths once the economy has happened? The test is typology. Christ fulfills Adam because Scripture itself presents him as the new Adam, a revealed type, intended within the economy. Christ does not fulfill Prometheus. Prometheus is not a latent or hidden fact about soteriological grammar. We may still allegorize Prometheus for what light it gives, provided we remember we are doing allegory and not handling real typology. This is the point where Montejo's grammatical idiom and his real commitments seem to pull apart. Ask yourself, is mythopoetic convergence necessary and sufficient for theological meaning?

Here is where I think Montejo is right. Fourth Mansions dramatizes descent, burial, third-day emergence, and theosis as wholeness. The novel is clearly about Freddy’s ascent. It is just that Freddy’s ascent is gratuitous and cycle-breaking, a received ascent of the human who is the holy fool Freddy Foley, and of the human nature this holy fool shares with Christ. Yet once the ascent is placed there, Montejo’s governing mythopoetic figure of descent and ascent as “a single reciprocal movement” gives way. A reciprocal movement runs its variability on both sides at once: God humanized to the extent that man is divinized. Montejo's language is fine if read weakly as being about the asymmetrical reciprocity of love rather than as a metaphysical co-constitution of God and creature.

Let’s work it through. In Christ, the side that ascends in the Ascension is the assumed humanity. Freddy is a creature with a human nature, and what happens to Freddy is the creature’s reception of grace. That grace is given by God and raises the creature toward him; the divine nature is its source and its term. The movement cannot be reciprocal, because the divine nature does not ascend alongside the creature. To make it reciprocal is to let glory be predicated of the divine nature in the same motion that it is received by the creature.

What does this have to do with East of Laughter and its Christology? Well, it bears on the nature of Christological laughter through the same dyothelite grammar one finds in the kenosis dispute. The question there is not whether the word kenosis may be used but where it is predicated: is it a self-emptying of the divine nature itself (the Hegel–Bulgakov line, and Balthasar after them) or the divine person freely assuming a passible humanity, which then undergoes the conditions of the flesh it assumes? The traditional view holds the latter: the Son takes on "what he did not have" without loss of divinity. The act of emptying belongs to the human nature; what is lowly is the humanity freely assumed. Montejo's phrase "divine self-emptying" can be read as shorthand for the self-emptying of the divine Son in his assumed humanity, the orthodox sense. His larger idiom leaves it open to the stronger sense without quite committing to it. The question I have comes from his endorsement of Bulgakov's elevation of kenosis to "the basic, unifying idea for theology," reaching "from creation to eschatology": a kenosis made that universal is hard to keep confined to the assumed humanity.

The own formulations are weaker than they look. When he unites "divine self-limitation" and creaturely ascent "vitally, ontologically," he places the union "in the fullness of time," when "God will be all in all," economic and eschatological, not immanent. And when he calls deification participation in "the self-giving love that is the inner life of the divine Godhead," what he locates in God is self-giving love, not self-emptying; self-giving love in the Godhead is traditional, the language of the processions. It tips toward the stronger reading if that love is equated with kenosis.

The one part I myself would not lean on is the exclusion of loss in Trinitarian kenosis, because it does not help Montejo and may do the opposite. That Bulgakov calls self-diminution "foreign to creation" does not keep kenosis economic, since the objection is not to kenosis as loss but to kenosis as constitutive. A sacrifice purified of diminution is what Bulgakov affirms all the way up, as the "foundation" of the divine all-blessedness, and to found blessedness on sacrifice is to make it constitutive of the divine life, not to guard against it. If anything, clearing out diminution leaves standing the non-diminishing kenosis that a "no loss of divinity" footnote in the essay does not reach. So my criticism is not that his essay drives the phrase to the stronger meaning, but that by endorsing Bulgakov's elevation of kenosis to the unifying principle of theology, he leaves it unguarded, open to the immanent reading Bulgakov states outright, the one Montejo himself, elsewhere, takes pains to safeguard against. Bulgakov says the Father's "self-renunciation" and "self-emptying in the begetting of the Son" is a sacrifice he calls "pre-eternal." That is kenosis in the processions, not the economy.

Sharpen this with the hardest thing in the Gospels, the cry of dereliction on the Cross. Does Christ's kenotic self-abasement mean he loses the beatifying effect of the vision of God on the Cross? Does his full vision of the essence of God go dark on the Cross? My view, which is White's, is that he did not lose the vision, because if he did, it would import the economy of salvation into the subsisting relations of the Trinity. The passion was suffered on the human side because the divine nature is eternal and impassible. As contemporary Thomists have pointed out, by a special dispensation, the joy of the beatific vision was confined to the higher reason and did not redound to the lower powers and the body. This is how Christ suffered and was desolate in the sensitive part of his being. It isn’t that he kept the vision and somehow suffered anyway. Instead, the vision's consolation was walled off from the powers where the suffering occurred. He retained the beatific vision, with its beatifying overflow suspended below.

Now extend this thinking about the divine nature and its impassibility to laughter. Laughter would belong to Christ's human nature: it is a bodily expression (breath, voice, the convulsive motion) of a delight of the human soul, and both the cognitive trigger and the bodily discharge are human acts. The divine nature is bodiless and impassible. It cannot laugh in this sense, though the Old Testament speaks of God laughing in a manner I will qualify in a moment. Of course, Aristotle observed that man alone laughs (De Partibus Animalium III.10). After Porphyry, one part of the theological tradition made laughter the textbook proprium, proper to all and only humans. Laughter was thought to flow from rational animality while standing outside the definition. Laughter is part of the complete humanity the Son assumed, or at least it seems to me that Lafferty thought as much. By the communication of idioms, it is predicated of the person: one cannot say “the Godhead laughed,” yet one can say “the Son of God laughed.” There, the term names the person who laughs with a human mouth. So Christ's laughter is human in nature and filial in mode: the laughter of the Son, expressive of his divine identity, is not transposed onto the divine nature. In other words, kenosis and laughter are aspects of Christ’s human nature.

Two riders, with the second taking us into East of Laughter. First, Psalm 2's “He who sits in the heavens laughs,” which East of Laughter quotes, is a metaphor. It depicts the Trinity’s serene, impassible sovereignty by its effect; it is not a passion in the Trinity. Second, and this is what makes laughter interesting: laughter sits on the side of joy, and joy is an “affect” with an analogue in the divine nature, the gaudium of ST I, q. 20, a. 1, joy in God as an act of will, not a passion. So Christological laughter is a doubled case. The act, the bodily laughing, is human, kept on the human side just as physical suffering is. But the delight it expresses, while a real joy of Christ's human soul, points analogically upward to something in the divine nature of God, which suffering does not do. Human nature remains human, without importing bodily passibility into the Godhead, even as the joy they express reaches toward the divine gaudium.

Read this way, one keeps a human attribute on the human nature side of the line. The problem with contemporary kenotic theology is that it does flirt with imposing genuinely human attributes onto the divine nature, with kenosis as the name for that transposition. To be a little more precise, the Son assumes the passible human nature; the humility, obedience, suffering, death; laughter occurs according to that assumed humanity. The Son acts according to his perfect human nature. There is nothing like ascent or descent inside the immanent Trinity. The dyothelite grammar that keeps Christ’s dereliction on the Cross and prevents it from migrating into the impassible Godhead is, I think, the real constitutive grammar, because it is theological grammar, and because it does not impute kenosis or laughter to an impassible nature. It keeps Freddy's relation to divine grace and theosis in view, and it tells us something powerful about Lafferty’s Laughing Christ. It makes Lafferty’s imagination more incarnational, not less.

In the end, these are not questions one settles apart from a whole way of understanding Christology. Outside the Creed, faithful readers may reason carefully and still part ways. Most readers won’t care one iota about understanding such matters. Ascent and descent will be poetic figures for them. They won’t give a tinker’s damn about the theological weirdness of Bulgakov’s invention of a kenosis of God the Father to the Son. I have given the reading of Christ's kenosis and laughter that I find fits best with Lafferty. Montejo may or may not have read Lafferty differently, but this is the kind of conversation I enjoy.